GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – A Guatemalan court on Wednesday sentenced Jose Zamora, a well-known journalist whose work has criticized successive governments, to six years in prison for money laundering in a case rights groups have branded an attack on free speech.
Zamora was also issued a 300,000 quetzal ($38,339) fine, the court said. He was absolved of charges of blackmail and influence peddling, of which he had also been accused.
Zamora, 66, has said the case against him is a “political persecution” by President Alejandro Giammattei due to reporting on alleged corruption involving the president and his close allies in Zamora’s newspaper, elPeriodico, which shut down in May.
Zamora founded elPeriodico, one of the country’s leading investigative media outlets, in 1996.
He was arrested in July last year during a crackdown on prosecutors, judges, human rights activists, journalists and opposition officials.
According to the attorney general’s office, Zamora allegedly received $38,461 to finance his media outlet, which was not regularly deposited into the banking system.
The case developed rapidly and involved 11 hearings in which the defendant’s evidence was not admitted, and eight changes of defense attorneys, some of whom now face their own legal proceedings for involvement in Zamora’s defense.
“To ask for a sentence of 40 years is absolutely disproportionate and shows the viciousness with which journalism is being persecuted in Guatemala,” the Human Rights Watch’s Americas director Juanita Goebertus said, pointing to prosecutors’ request for a much harsher sentence.
The rights group is “very concerned” that Guatemala’s prosecutors’ office is investigating journalists and columnists from elPeriodico who covered Zamora’s case, Goebertus added.
($1 = 7.8250 quetzals)
(Reporting by Sofia Menchu; Writing by Sarah Morland; Editing by Brendan O’Boyle and Bill Berkrot)
